At the end of the month and of the year 2012 we may not see the end of the world, to the disappointment of mayan calenderists, survivalists, and assorted ufologists, yet, the situation is rather apocalyptic.

During 2012 the climate crisis brought extreme weather phenomena, while the economic crisis became a permanent fixture in parts of the global north. The global south, with a few exceptions, did not really catch up as it also suffers from the repercussions of the global economic slow-down. Inequality within most countries grew as well. So were tensions, violence, unemployment, bigotry and fascism.. The system’s holy pillars – supposedly too big to fail/fall on our heads, the banks, have been re-erected with public, tax payers money – money now missing from Health and Education – and essentially unreformed, they are back to business as usual. A few dictators were replaced by new ones, while regional wars, declared and undeclared, provided excellent export and field-testing opportunities for the military-industrial complex(es) new toys. The melting ice opened wonderful business opportunities for oil industry drilling and shipping lanes, while ungrateful mining workers asking for a meager rise were summarily shot. The world is overflowing with consumer goods covering artificial needs, which are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and requiring fewer workers to produce them. Multinationals and launderers and cleaners of all sorts keep avoiding taxes legally, through the use of tax heavens, while the internet is overflowing with freebies by e-multinationals and soulless anti-social social networks. At the same time, those brave or foolish enough to leak documents and test the internet’s real limits are held indefinitely or hunted like witches. Who is really paying for all this fake “freedom”? Perhaps real freedom and those against it.

Global tourism is supposed to be resilient, with tourism arrivals still growing – supporting the productivist love and myth of never-ending yet ‘sustainable’ growth - although it could be that fewer people are taking more journeys. After all refugees and migrants are not being counted by tourism statisticians, but by border and detention centre guards, in the best case. At the same time mega-projects by offshore developers, more real estate than tourism, are destroying the last remaining wild coastal and forested areas.

In such an increasingly complex and barbaric state of affairs, is there a place and a chance for simplistic, pacifist, bottom-up, mutual aid, mutualist, alternative networks – can they make a difference and constitute parts of a new structure “within the shell of the (decaying?) old”. Indeed, when there are so few examples of genuine, ecological and socially just tourism and so few worker-managed tourism businesses? Can and should there ever be an non-systemic type of tourism combining the best elements of community tourism and voluntourism and totally avoiding corporate channels (such as airlines and large tour operators), or is inequality and exploitation of some sort built in the very notion of tourism (as a holiday industry) as opposed to genuine hospitality (and genuine travel)? Would / could / should this new type of tourism avoid monetary transactions or at least profits or use alternative currencies, or is it too much to ask? After all monetary exchange at the grassroots level can be emancipating and collectivism can only work if voluntary.

Let us hope for some progress or at least some answers, in 2013, for the sake of those (many or few, hard to tell) who really support (with both words and deeds) that another world and another tourism is possible through our everyday peaceful revolutions. For those who do not expect any scraps - or solutions to real problems - from the “triple-bottom-corporately-socially-responsible” multinationals, their chums inside intergovernmental bureaucracies, their public-private “partnerships” and golden handshakes with sponsored members of neoliberal or statist governments.

Let us try as anyway, we have nothing to lose but our (hotel) chains :)